If you’re not quite familiar with the production chains, I’d recommend a mining/trade hub. It’s really easy to setup, and done correctly will make a tidy profit. It will also give you invaluable experience with basic design, how to use trade rules and managing subordinates. Since you started as a Young Gun, you’ve likely already explored Grand Exchange which is an excellent sector for a mining hub. Not only is there high demand for minerals/gas in sector itself and the resources plentiful but usually, the neighbouring systems of BHS and Pious Mists are in need too. Dependent on how far you’ve progressed, SCA may also have built stations in Nopileos Fortune that will be looking for Hydrogen.
To setup a very basic mining hub all you need is: L/XL pier, M/S dock/1, M solid storage/1 M liquid storage. No need for habitats as your only “population” will be your manager. Design it however you want - just make sure ships can easily get to and from the pier/docks.
While the station is being built:
1. Buy 4 medium miners - 2 x gas, 2 x solid. These ships will become your collectors - they will mine and then transport the goods to your hub. I usually name them Collector S1/S2,G1,G2 respectively but you don’t have to.
2. Under global options create a trade rule called ‘My faction only’ or ‘Just Me’ whatever you feel appropriate. In the factions list make sure you only select your own faction and nothing else.
Once the station is built:
1. Find a manager and assign them to the hub. If you have some seminars handy train your manager to two stars in management. You don’t have to do this, the manager will train on the job, but the seminars just gets things moving a little quicker.
2. Go to the Logical Station overview and create buy orders ore, silicon, methane, hydrogen respectively. For each of the orders, manually set buy price to the lowest, leave storage on automatic and then add the ‘my faction only’ trade rule. You should now have an icon of a circle with a cross inside, on each of the buy orders. The reason we’re adding this rule should be obvious but for clarity, without it your manager will buy from other factions. We only want him to “buy” from the collector ships.
3. Assign the collectors ships you previously built to the hub as miners. They should now start moving off into the sector to mine.
While collectors are mining, let’s start to think about selling what we’re mining.
1. Buy 1 x M Gas miner and 1 x M Solid miner. These will be your distribution ships, I call them Seller G1, Seller S1 etc. As before there’s no need to rename ships, I just like the clarity.
2. Go back to the buy orders you created previously and create a sell order for each of the raw materials. Set the price to the lowest possible + 1Cr. Leave storage on automatic, don’t assign any trade rules.
3. Assign your seller ships to your hub as traders.
From now on, as the raw materials get delivered by your miners, the seller ships will go to the hub, collect from storage and sell to customers in the sector. As your manager gains experience your sellers will sell into neighbouring sectors as well.
Give me my profitssss:
To ensure you get regular payments from your mining hub go back to the logical overview and take a look at the budget. Ignore the the recommended budget. Set your budget to £2M credits. Once the station accumulates around £6M credits it will start to give you regular income. You can also set the budget to £1M if you’re strapped for cash after all the investment.
Scaling up:
Once you have all this in place, you can easily scale up by adding more collector and seller ships. The more you have, the quicker the goods go in and out. You can also use L miners to further increase your collection yield.
To really get things moving in terms of selling, consider using a combination of M and S miners as seller ships.
As you add more ships, consider upgrading the docks from 1M6S to the 3M6S. Or you could add the 3M dock right from the off if you can afford it.
Increase storage as needed. But personally, I’ve never needed to increase beyond medium solid/gas storage. Correctly setup and balanced, the raw materials will be delivered and sold pretty quickly as the demand is so high in GE and the surrounding sectors.
Add trade/sell orders for helium and Ice dependent on local demand, if appropriate.
What have you learned doing this:
1. How to design a basic trade station.
2. How to manage prices.
3. How to create trade rules and apply then.
4. How to assign ships as traders and miners.
5. How to get regular payments from trade stations.
6. How to scale up.
Things to bear in mind that’s unique to mining hubs.
1. For any other form of production, you cannot ignore the estimated budget as we did here. Mining hubs are unique in that they have no production and right now, the estimate budget calculation doesn’t quite work correctly for mining hubs. If you ignore the estimated value for say a engine parts factory and provide a budget under what’s recommended, it will not work properly.
2. Over time as your mining operation increase the Kha’ak will start to bother your collector ships. Some faction ships are better at dealing with this than others. I’ll let you discover that for yourself. But setting up in GE has the additional advantage that it’s well policed by both the Teladi Company and Ministry of Finance. I have yet to lose a mining ship in my current play through in GE.
3. I have seen recommendations for resource probes. Personally I don’t use them but you may want to investigate how they affect station miners and decide if you’d like to use them.
Good luck!
All best
Y.
Try not to spoil all the surprises for him, OK? 
